i totally disagree … if you haven’t a big list of VSTi there is no disadvantage for you too … and there is no overkill to sort the VST a little bit better …
every manufacturer makes special types of instruments - like spectrasonics: the great sample-players … and NI: great synths … so if i need a synth i think: let’s take something from the manufacturer XYZ … coz i know: this is what i need at the moment.
a list of VSTi can increase fast … you buy the bundle from NI (NI Komplete) here and the bundle from manufacturer xyz there … the next VSTi’s are bundled with soundcards etc. or what ever.
you are right: on the other hand there are hunderts of free VSTi’s with different names of the manufacturers but nevertheless i see no disadvantage if the manufacturer is shown too … it’s a help for people who using bundles from different manufacturers for a better overview … and no disadvantage for other people … it’s only a question of the menu/list layout to keep the overview - that’s all.
I bet many ppl (like me) have many single plugins - I mean only one plug from a certain dev installed. For these ppl sorting after developer would be a step into worse lands I guess.
Also not everyone has a good refined minimalised setup of a few good commercial plugs. Many have instead a big arsenal of freeware in their vst folder.
Personally I’d appreciate an optional index.txt file, this had the big advantage of being able to have redundancy in the list.
i vote for user-set directories here… i imagine i have a mastering directory where i can quickly find what am i looking for… now it’s o TORTURE for me to find some plugin within the hundreds of others…
I totally agree - user-set dirs would ideally mean nobody could complain afterwards how it was setup… as they’d be able to set it up to their liking, or not at all (Bantai) - this is something that would greatly simplify the process of working for me, I can’t state that enough!
Featuring Users-Set directories should allow people to both arrange their list by manifacturer and arrange it with any other order they like.
Honestly I can’t see what good should the manifacturer sorting bring. Each manifacturer features a short number of plugins (often 2 or 3…) and they often are very different in their functions… while there is an almost endless number of “single” different VSTi around the net. All of these “single” VSTi would quite certainly have their one-shot manifacturer… so I figure out such list as only having longer names on each raw still offering no/little indexing help under the logical point of view.
When composing I don’t think
“Hm! Here I really would like to hear some plugin from Spectrasonic”…
I rather think
“Hm! Here I really would like to hear some ambient noise…”
To make the user-defined setup faster, renoise could export an index.txt file based on the directory structure of the plugin folder.
Then the user already has something to builed on, he/ she just has to fire up a text editor and edit a bit.